Update

This will have to be a quick post, but long overdo. No pictures because I have been temporarily separated from my camera cable. From Nelspruit, where we were introduced to the world of rugby with a Super 14 final crash course(cross-listed under drinking) we moved on to Mozambique. There was some uncertainty about whether we would be able to get the car and both of us across the border, but with the help of a friendly volunteer(who then demanded to be payed) we did it in just under an hour. The roads were not as bad as we had been lead to believe except for certain very short stretches. The stretch of highway just north of Maputo that serves as the city's bus station is an incredible tangle of traffic and people and commerce and it took an impressive amount of time to negotiate it.
Being the winter, it is rather the off season at the beaches of Mozambique. In fact literally no one else was there. The Indian Ocean is really quite warm, but the air was too chill to be comfortable with a stiff breeze. The beaches themselves were also quite lovely, but as the only tourists there was quite a bit of pressure from vendors of souvenirs. We decided to head to the capital a day early and see the sites, which we did. The national art museum was fascinating. All of the art was local, and none of it was more than about 30 years old(post independence). Most of it was also quite distrubing, which given the decade-or-so long civil war is very understandable. Unfortunately we missed almost half the exhibits because the power went out. The guide book instructed us to keep our passports at all times, which we did, luckily because a pair of police officers(with uzis!) casually demanded to see them as we were wandering the street. Someone later told us that they sometimes also demand money, but not from us. Other than that the people were quite friendly and very understanding(maybe forgiving is a better word) of the fact that Spanish and Portuguese are not nearly as similar as I had hoped. English speakers were few and far between so there was a fair amount of hand waving and drawing diagrams in the dirt. Not that Mozambique wasn't lovely, but we left early. We've been missing the food and music ever since.
We moved on to Swaziland, which looks a bit like New Mexico, but not quite so dry and more densely settled, with a network of small, mostly subsistence farms. We visited a reconstructed village from 100 years ago. Apparently the going rate for a bride--17 cows--hasn't changed since then. I'm glad I'm not Swazi for that reason any way. The valley we visited was beautiful and we also caught some traditional dancing, along with 100 Swazi high schoolers who made it much more engaging with their whistles and shouts. We were definitely missing some nuances of the dancing because seemingly unexciting parts of the dance drove them into a frenzy. Several of them ran onto the stage to leave change in front of their favorite dancers.
We returned to South Africa less than a week after leaving and headed for lovely St. Lucia where we took in some more wild life, most notably many many hippos(they may also have been hungry hungry) and a truly lovely beach at Cape Vidal(which probably offers one of the shortest Rhino to beachfront drives on earth). We headed north to see the Drakensberg mountains, but it has been raining so hard(and snowing even--I thought this was Africa) that we haven't caught a glimpse. Hopefully we'll catch a glimpse tomorrow as we head back to Joberg to (hopefully) retrieve some of my pictures that I left in Maputo, and then on to Botswana.